In October 2010, New Hampshire residents woke up to find high voltage transmission route lines drawn across maps of their properties by a project with a name that sounded vaguely like “Northwest Passage,” the fabled effort to find a lucrative trade route from Europe to Asia. But this was “Northern Pass,” a Quebec-Connecticut plan to construct over 1400 visually jarring steel towers up to 155’ tall through a 187-mile swath of New Hampshire in order to reach lucrative energy markets in Southern New England.

Without seeking permission from landowners, much less notifying them, the Northern Pass developers had helped themselves freely to private property in New Hampshire to plot the route for their new elective power line. They assumed they would be able to take what they wanted by eminent domain. They told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission so.

But such confiscation of New Hampshire private property was not to be. Almost immediately, the New Hampshire legislature took steps to remedy the egregious insult with House Bill 648, which was passed in 2012. HB 648 closed a specific loophole in New Hampshire law and denied optional merchant utility projects with no foreseeable need like Northern Pass the right to petition the Public Utilities Commission to seize the property of New Hampshire residents.

HB 648 leveled the playing field. Northern Pass was obliged to start over and win its route fair and square. The contest began. A small minority of landowners sold to Northern Pass — for exorbitant offers — but the vast majority opposed the project. At town meetings from 2011 to 2013, ten towns on the then proposed route in Coos County, including Clarksville, Stewartstown, and Pittsburg, as well as 23 others to the south voted against Northern Pass in non-binding warrant articles. And thousands donated to the Forest Society’s campaign to block the project’s intended route, an effort to compel the developers to produce a responsible proposal with viable alternatives acceptable to the public.

The will of the people was clear. Northern Pass had failed to win the heart and mind of New Hampshire. Unable to convince more landowners to sell it a bypass around the Connecticut Lakes Headwaters conservation tract, Northern Pass was at a dead end. This should have led to a new proposal respectful of New Hampshire’s people and environment or ended the project, but neither occurred.

Instead, on June 27, 2013, the residents of Pittsburg, Clarksville and Stewartstown woke up to find high voltage transmission route lines drawn on maps of public roads in their towns by a project whose name they now knew all too well, Northern Pass. They learned the developers are planning to use eight miles of local roads to patch together a new route some 187 miles long, with only a tiny fraction (4%) underground.

Northern Pass did not ask for the permission of these towns to use their roads nor will it. On its website, the project says that where it has not been able to purchase private land or easements for its new route, it “will seek permission to use [other land] as part of its permit application with the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee.” That is, Northern Pass, a private project ineligible for eminent domain, will bypass communities and request the SEC to authorize its use of town roads. Having failed to win over the public fair and square on the merits of the project, Northern Pass has found another loophole and will once again resort to preemptive means to force its way through New Hampshire.

What’s to stop Northern Pass from seeking such preemptive solutions that use public road “workarounds” for its routing problems further south, for instance, near the airport in Pembroke or on existing PSNH easements with pole height, placement, and other restrictions?

Contact your representatives, senators, executive councilors, Governor Hassan. Tell them that New Hampshire still has crucial work to do to level the playing field in siting energy facilities — we must protect our citizens and communities from preemptive moves like the one that a merchant developer now plans to request in Pittsburg, Clarksville, and Stewartstown. And perhaps, as time goes on, in your town too.

Susan Schibanoff, a member of Responsible Energy Action LLC, is a former Seacoast resident.